Editorial voices from newspapers across the country
Editorial voices from newspapers across the United States:
The Gadsden (Ala.) Times
We often comment on statistics that put Alabama in a bad light, for one reason or another, compared to its fellow states.
Witness a report released last month by Truth Initiative, which describes itself as “America’s largest nonprofit public health organization dedicated to making tobacco use a thing of the past.” Its efforts are primarily aimed at youth and young adults.
The report labels 12 U.S. states – all contiguous, spanning the Upper Midwest to the Deep South – as “Tobacco Nation.”
Alabama is on that list, joining Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia. It’s not something to be proud of.
We’ve known officially for 53 years – even longer unofficially – that smoking is bad, that it kills people and that it costs taxpayers money. At the same time, we’ve seen how the overall smoking rate has declined drastically in the U.S., courtesy of anti-tobacco efforts and governmental attempts to compel behavioral changes by banning smoking in restaurants, bars and the like, or ramping up tobacco taxes.
“Tobacco Nation” is a troubling outlier, however. Perhaps this report will grab the attention of those 12 states and fuel an increased anti-smoking push.
Why not describe it as a “war?” That noun tends to make people get serious about a problem. Given the human and monetary toll at stake, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration, either.
Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, Wis.
America doesn’t need an unprecedented and dangerous constitutional convention to balance its federal budget. It needs real leadership, more courage and cooperation in Washington.
President Donald Trump and the Republican-run Congress, for example, should be able to simplify the tax code without adding $1 trillion or more to the nation’s $20 trillion of debt.
They should be able to slow spending increases on entitlements and the military without a constitutional requirement to do so.
They should be able to pay for basic government services, such as roads, by raising fees on motorists for the first time in more than two decades, rather than borrowing to get by.
Those are the kinds of responsible actions it will take to balance the federal budget – not opening up our nation’s most sacred document to the risk of wild revisions.
A constitutional convention isn’t the answer to America’s serious fiscal problems. If such a requirement were actually enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, it could force huge spending cuts or giant tax increases in the face of wars or recessions.
The real danger of a constitutional convention is that its delegates – likely state lawmakers from around the country – would stray from their stated goal and push dramatic changes to our democracy and rights.
The Detroit News
Students aren’t the only ones skipping class, according to a new report. Many teachers are, too. That poses problems for obvious reasons.
The report, “Teacher Absenteeism in Charter and Traditional Public Schools,” was published by the Fordham Institute, and took a deep dive through teacher absenteeism numbers collected by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
Education reform and policy advocates often point to student attendance as an important measure of a school’s performance, and attendance is closely linked to a student’s likelihood of graduating. But not much attention, at least on a statewide level, is put on teacher attendance.
Michigan teachers aren’t the only ones taking extra time off. It’s a nationwide problem.
This isn’t meant to cast a bad light on teachers. Most work hard and likely have valid reasons for taking the occasional day off. But taken as a whole – and given their integral role in student learning – this is too much time for teachers to be missing.